Jump Shot, Rebound, Slam Dunk

About 10 yards from the curb of 6th Avenue, in the heart of New York’s Greenwich Village, a chain-link cage, 20 feet tall, encloses a few dozen men in shorts or jeans, soiled Ts or hooded sweatshirts, who, on any given sunny day, will run one another into the ground in an attempt to put a vinyl ball through a hoop, 10 feet in the air.

Ever since I retired at the age of 16 (for reasons of fear and safety), pausing for 10 or 15 minutes to peer through the fence at this Village court has been my sole connection to the world of playground basketball. The Village court is still very much alive for John Edgar Wideman.

Author of a dozen books of fiction, nonfiction and memoir, Wideman at 59 is still able to lace his sneakers, wrap his knees and venture onto the sacred asphalt. Yet the turn of the millennium, the end of his marriage and the intimations of mortality that can no longer be masked by Bengay, have led him to ponder the role of playground basketball in his life.

In a series of seven essays titled “Hoop Roots,” Wideman paints his earliest recollections of the court in the Homewood section of Pittsburgh, where he grew up with his mother, his grandmother and a collection of other women in a small house next to the railroad tracks. He writes of the summer of his 12th year, when he baby-sat his dying grandmother in the morning and later ran out to the court in Westinghouse Park in hope of being picked for a game by one of the many surrogate fathers with nothing better to do than bounce a ball.

Wideman meditates on the local players who eventually graduated from that Westinghouse Park court to integrate the ranks of the NBA, and searches for the origins of the jump shot in a parable on the early Harlem Globetrotters. He assembles the heredity of Westinghouse, the old-timers passing the ball to the kings and then to the young bloods, in the same way he traces the genealogy of his mother’s family through a shoebox of old photographs. He visits the cage in Greenwich Village with a young French woman and tries to explain why playground basketball has the Proustian power to uncover memories that he’d lost years before. For “Hoop Roots” is about basketball in the same way “Remembrance of Things Past” is about baking.

“Writing autobiography, looking back, trying to recall and represent yourself at some point in the past, you are playing many games simultaneously.... None offers the clarifying, cleansing unity of playing hoop. The ball court provides a frame, boundaries, the fun and challenge of call and response that forces you to concentrate your boundless energy within a defined yet seemingly unlimited space.”

To call “Hoop Roots” mere memoir is to accept the shoulder feint Wideman throws at the reader. The loose rules of the game allow Wideman the freedom to range beyond his immediate history into a play-by-play of the racial politics of the latter half of the American 20th century. “Though playground hoop offers ‘buked and scorned participants an outlet for energies stifled by the mainstream, players don’t thank the mainstream for providing this opportunity.

Rather, playground hoop repudiates the ‘mainstream.’ Insists on separate accommodations, separate destinies.... Playground hoop is a witness to the bankruptcy of America’s promise of democratic equality.” There are also sallies at a kind of anthropological research, with the author commenting on African folklore and traveling to the Maya ruins of Chichen-Itza to investigate the Mezo-American “ball game.”

Fortunately, the closest “Hoop Roots” comes to academic inquiry is a self-mocking scene in which Professor Wideman somewhat reluctantly fends off the full-court press of a young woman flush with the victory of her thesis defense. Wideman writes more like a preacher than an essayist, extemporizing, circling back, sniffing,revisiting, testing new paths of the labyrinth to the basket. Like the showboats on the playground court of Greenwich Village, Wideman can spend a lot of time onthe way to the basket in a displayof fancy dribbling. For those ofus on the other side of the fence, that may be entertainment enough.

Yet the most affecting scene returns to a paradox that is personal, political and anthropological at the same time: a tragedy central to Wideman’s work. Back in Homewood as a grown man, Wideman runs into Ed Fleming, a onetime pro from the neighborhood. Fleming is a Homewood success story, “an inside player his entire college and professional career. The sort of smart banger, hustler, who contests every free ball. Persistent, fearless, he picks up the loose change most players treat as below their notice, chump change floating around at unspectacular moments in a game.”

Yet the scene for the reunion is far from celebratory but as common as the netless hoops around the city: Warden’s Funeral Home, where Fleming is attending a service down the hall from the room that holds the body of the son of Wideman’s incarcerated brother, Wideman’s nephew, Omar, dead at 21 from a gangland slaying.

Without picking too sharply at the wound, “Hoop Roots” continues to ask the basic Wideman question, familiar to readers of his “Brothers and Keepers” and the occasional news stories about Wideman and his family: Why did John Edgar, like Ishmael, float free of the maelstrom, while his brother, his nephew and, most tragically, his son, serving a life sentence for murder, were dragged down into crime, to pass the rest of their lives in cages or worse?

The answer, as Wideman so ably plays it, might just as well be found on the playground courts in the jump shots, the rebounds, in the empty iron O, 10 mocking feet above the asphalt.